Well, I have to say, my interests in running the latest and greatest software comes at a price.
I’ve taken to running svn releases of Wordpress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.
For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.
Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.
Well, after abandoning my post for updating this for a while, I figure I might want to try Steve Yegge’s suggestion of being more opinionated in my blog. If nothing more, it might generate a bit of hate mail.
I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?
Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.
Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.
PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.
And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.
Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.
Besides just being a little lazy, I have had a few reasons for neglecting the site. Being on vacation recently is one of the larger ones, but generally it doesn’t matter. In disgust with how non-productive i’ve been, i’m going to start working on random stuff and little projects. Before I do that though, i’m going to try to get my Vim to be set up the way I like my editors.
For quite a while, i have struggled to find the perfect editor. I heard people praise various editors, but I have a big problem: I’m very multiplatformed. I run Ubuntu linux, windows xp, and windows vista on my main desktop and Mac OS X on my laptop. I like things to stay similar between them all so I can be consistent. My editor is one of the big things. This made something like TextMate hard to even look at. It’s supposed to be a great reasonably priced (40 euros) text editor for mac and mac only. Vim runs on pretty much everything. The problem is, I like to be able to see directory layouts, nice open buffer displays and a few other things that Vim isn’t nice for out of the box. I can live without them, but it’s not nearly as nice as I would like. Lucky for me, Alex Young wrote up instructions on how to enable the textmate like features in vim. I am excited and will be trying this as soon as I’m done here.
The end result is a cross platform, comfortable text editor for my coding needs. I would encourage you to look into it if you are looking for a cross platform solution or just want a really nice text editor. You will probably want a customized vimrc for everything you do as well. I’ll post mine after I get all this set up in it. It’s rather crazy (and mostly written by one of my friends, Saleem Abdulrasool).
UPDATE: Success! All the plugins are awesome and work exactly as they should. I uploaded my current vimrc. *nix wants it to be named .vimrc in your home directory and windows looks for _vimrc (i think) in the vim directory. If that doesn’t work (i’m more skeptical about windows; i haven’t used vim in windows for a while), check the vim documentation. View my vimrc at http://quad341.com/projects/vim.rc
As mentioned in my post earlier today, I just got my new media player, a Cowon D2. Let me clarify farther: I got this device yesterday. As such, some of my opinions might change with more use.
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I noticed that there was some interest on the Dreamhost forums for AJAX to register for lists. I thought this was a good idea, and upon finding no solution, I set out to make one.
I admit that both this is not terribly easy to set up nor is it terribly hard. You have to modify 1 php file and include the required components on your web page. There is a full readme enclosed to help you get it set up.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment!
Download the code
Ok, I haven’t forgotten about the cURL tutorial or updating the site. I just happen to be quite busy right now. This weekend I hope to have some time to finish up the cURL stuff (I am working on it, it’s just not done) and hopefully get back to my project. This is somewhat of a reminder to myself as well, so hopefully it works! I also promise to make all of the source code available of both the problems and solutions.
Random cool thing I found: tntnet. I had heard about C++ server pages before, but tntnet is the project that really makes them shine. They claim that it can serve c++ dynamic pages fast than traditional web servers (probably apache) can serve static pages because the c++ pages get compiled. Awesome for speed. The syntax looks pretty nice to for making the views (and you get the c++ goodness for all of the processing).
Ok. I finally am coming to have some free time and have already started making things for the public.
I noticed that there aren’t many (if any) good cURL tutorials that show you some of the power of cURL like manipulating cookies and such. Such a tutorial could be used for good (such as unit testing your work) or evil (trying to program a bot to do something that requires a login). After I get my contrived examples created and can demonstrate them, I’ll write up the tutorial that looks at cURL in more detail. This is supposed to both show users how to use cURL better as well as for site administrators to get an idea what could cause vulnerabilities. I will also discuss ways to create login systems to defeat cURL.
To be posted soon…
Ok so i haven’t posted in almost 20 days. That’s not exactly what I would call being attentive of my blog. Um… sorry? This isn’t exactly a fix. I haven’t gottent any new chillout and my other activities I want to keep hidden for now. Yes, I have been doing something that I will eventually post here. If you’re really curious, my development site is located at dev.quad341.com and does have information about what is going on. Hopefully by mid-April I will have a working example of this project and announce it to the world. I welcome actual inquery and the repository allows for anonymous checkouts. In the mean time, I need more music. Suggestions?
Well, I was trying to get PreFormance (I think that’s what the one blogging extension is called) set up through my Firefox installation under Linux, but that wasn’t working for a thus unsolved reason. I guess I’ll continue to use the web interface for the time being. Also, there’s a fairly severe security hold in WordPress version 2.1.1. Make sure you update to 2.1.2 as soon as you can. I have other matters that need more immediate attention, but I plan to post more about music soon.
I don’t know if any of you have heard of DreamHost, but it is an amazing hosting site. The plans are crazy cheap and give you more bandwidth and space than you would ever imagine elsewhere. It is shared/managed hosting, but you get shell access and have access to most services you would ever want. I’m quite happy. It was a bit annoying to transfer everything (I ended up using scp through a shell thanks to a friend’s suggestion), but otherwise is great. The best part for all of you is that I can now give you a discount for the referral.
Here’s what you have to do:
- Go to the DreamHost sign up page
- Set up your account however you would like.
- At the bottom enter
QUADGIFT as your Promo Code to get $10 off of any hosting package you select
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I have nothing but good things to say about DreamHost thus far. I would highly suggest them for anyone looking for a new host.